The most dangerous I’ve seen recently was an old, badly beat up and rusted pickup with a 5-lug (rear) hub with only two lugs installed… and the rim bent and wobbling as the truck rolled down the road. It had Mass plates and was about 35 miles north of the Mass/NH border, so I can only assume he drove on the highway like this. I kept my distance from that thing, I’ll tell ya.
Only 2 lugs out of 5 is really pushing the envelope. I’d avoid it like the plague also and odds are the driver of that thing is fully aware of it.
It’s kind of pathetic that as cheap as lugs are they didn’t splurge on at least 2 more.
When I’m at pick a part, I often see guys buying brake pads and rotors from the junk vehicles
I’ll bet you lunch that they’re not even measuring those rotors for thickness and runout, let alone throw them on the lathe to clean them up
And they have no way of knowing if those junkyard brakes were factory, or white box special
If they’re white box special, the labor to remove them is more than they’re worth
Even if he had removed one each from two of the other wheels to add to the existing two…
My guess is that the truck probably had so many serious things wrong with it that the owner just didn’t care anymore. That was perhaps the real most dangerous thing about the truck.
By the way, I just realized the similarity of this to that classic old brain teaser, but I actually did see it.
Or this old joke:
A guy gets a flat next to an insane asylum. He takes the 5 lug nuts off and put them in the hubcap. He turns to get the spare, steps on the hubcap, and the nuts fly off and go down a sewer. As he’s pondering what to do, an inmate of the asylum who is observing through the fence says, “Just take one nut off each of the other three wheels.” The guy says, “Wow, thanks. You’ve saved my day.” The inmate says, “I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.”
;-]
I know people who will take tons to time to install some crap used part and then have to redo the job within a few months. I had recently scrapped out a car and there was a control arm and ball joint sitting in a pile of junk I was going to haul off. A guy saw it and said that the ball joint still had some life in it and wanted it. I let him have it but I would rather just buy new.
I saw a guy in and old F-100 which was way over loaded and was having a hard time keeping it straight on the road. When I passed this guy up his front wheels were actually leaving the ground a few inches every time he hit a small bump in the road.
Then there was the pickup on the side of the road loaded with tree logs, the funny thing was it was so overloaded the 2 rear tires went flat.
The truck stop where I once worked got asll kinds coming off the interstate. Back in the day, when there were still actual “hippies”, we had a VW microbus come rolling in with an obvious flat drivers front tire. The driver said he would like to buy a used tire, and at this time it was a strange fit (for the bible belt, hell we drove Fords and Chevys). Anyway my boss asked me to put it up on the rack and when I started it the engine raced really high, wouldn’t drop, when I got it inside it was still racing and I could’t hear my partner guide me onto the rack. The hippy jumped in and said he knew how to knock down the idle, that it did it all the time. He opened the engine compartment and leaned in to grab (I guess) the throttle cable. His hair got caught in the belt pulley and it was heck of a mess, real pieces of scalp came off with the hair! Wow man! Not cool! Rocketman